A shark killed one person and seriously injured another on Thursday at a beach in the eastern Australian state of New South Wales, rescuers and police said.
The attack took place early in the morning and one of the victims, a woman, died instantly.
The other suffered a serious leg injury and was airlifted from the remote Crowdy Bay beach, about 250 kilometers north of Sydney, to hospital in a stable condition.
“They knew each other, they were going swimming and the shark attacked,” New South Wales Police Inspector Timothy Bayly told reporters.
State Ambulance Inspector Joshua Smyth credited a passerby with potentially saving the man’s life by wrapping a makeshift tourniquet around his leg.
“The courage of some passers-by is incredible in this situation. Putting yourself in this situation is very heroic,” he added.
Steven Pearce, chief executive of Surf Life Saving NSW, described it as “a really, really terrible incident”.
“This area is so isolated that there are no surveillance services there,” Pearce told local radio 2GB.
The beach and surrounding areas have been closed and authorities are working to determine what species of shark attacked the two swimmers.
Protecting humans and sharks
There have been more than 1,280 shark incidents in Australia since 1791, more than 250 of which resulted in death, according to a database of predator encounters with humans.
Oceanians are most likely to be bitten by great white sharks, tiger sharks and bull sharks, data shows.
In September, a great white mauled a surfer to death at a popular Sydney beach.
The man, who leaves behind a wife and a young daughter, lost “a number of limbs” and his surfboard was broken in two, police said.
Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great white sharks topping the list of species likely to fatally bite a human.
Undeterred, Australians are flocking to the sea in large numbers: a 2024 survey shows almost two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year.
How best to protect people from sharks is a sensitive subject in Australia.
Authorities have taken a multi-layered approach: deploying drones, installing acoustic trackers on sharks so they can be detected by listening buoys near popular beaches, alerting people in real time with a mobile app and setting nets the old-fashioned way.
Researchers say shark life must also be protected.
Globally, about 37% of oceanic shark and ray species are now listed as endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a database of threatened species.
